Further to the Corporate and Financial Weekly Digest article published on August 29, 2014, in which we described a letter (Letter) that the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) had sent to the FCA Practitioner Panel the week before, the FCA has now published a web page which further clarifies its use of attestations.

As we noted previously, the FCA introduced attestations as a formal “supervisory tool” to seek a personal commitment from an approved person at the relevant FCA authorized firm that specific action has been taken or will be taken. The FCA’s aim for attestations is to ensure that there is clear accountability and senior management focus on specific issues where the FCA would like to see change within firms (often without any on-going regulatory involvement).

On its new web page, the FCA:

• states what its aims are for the use of attestations and the most usual scenarios in which they will be used, reiterating information that it provided in the Letter; and

• publishes data on the number of attestations it requested during 2014. The webpage separately discloses the number of attestations by sector and conduct classification for 2014.

The number of attestations requested by the FCA during 2014 was 59, with the wholesale (i.e., non-retail) and investment management sector being the sector most subject to attestation requests. The FCA will be publishing quarterly information regarding its requests for attestations, so it should be possible to see trends emerging in due course. (However, as a result of data protection/privacy issues, the specific recipients of attestation requests cannot be ascertained from the FCA’s new web page or the published data.)

The FCA’s web page on attestations is available here.